OpenSea Forcing 0% Royalties?

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gm, let's get after this new week 😊

Here's what to expect from today's newsletter:

😡 OpenSea causing everyone to get upset🍾 y00ts finally reveals🎨 Where is the ART?

• Incredible AI NFT project Altered State Machine partners with Fifa.com to work on a metaverse street football game. (@altstatemachine)

• FTX and Binance feud over the former's FTT tokens which pushed its price down more than 20%. The CEO of FTX weighs in with a tweet thread. (@SBF_FTX)

• Google Cloud steps into the ring by the hand of Solana, making plans for a validator and introducing its blockchain node. Big moves by big players! (@googlecloud)

• The number of companies and businesses applying for metaverse and web 3 trademarks has tripled since 2021. (CT)

• NFTs by OneOf and Get Maine are boasting seafood utility, with holders getting fresh lobster shipped to their door straight from Maine. (DC)

• Ledger partners with Solana mobile to build an easy-to-use and secure Web3 experience for Solana Mobile users. (@Ledger)

OpenSea Forcing 0% Royalties? 😡

OpenSea wants to empower artists …but it doesn’t necessarily feel like that is always the case. The TLDR of OpenSea’s creator fees announcement is that OS will stop issuing creator royalty fees when someone buys an NFT, and thus they want the creators to bake in the royalty enforcement in the NFT smart contract itself. Their reasoning roughly is that the broader marketplace environment is no longer enforcing fees, so OpenSea thinks that this is to the detriment of creators and that the future of NFT trading will involve artists coding on-chain royalty enforcement into their contracts so that the creator is protected regardless of whether or not the marketplace practices royalty enforcement. OpenSea’s intention and rationale appear rather convincing since they also provide the on-chain enforcement tool that creators can implement.

However, here’s where things get messy.

Starting today, OS will only enforce creator royalties if newly launched collections use an on-chain enforcement tool. In other words, new collections don’t get the classic style of OpenSea mediated royalty enforcement unless the creator includes the code. But then what about existing collections?

This is where OpenSea’s commitment to the creator takes a complete nosedive. OS is stating that unless you have an upgradeable contract that can be updated with this tool, then beginning on 12/8/22 you will be liable to figure it out yourself. They suggest some pretty cumbersome and difficult solutions, like migrating the project to a new contract or - and get a load of this, “explore new forms of monetization and alternative ways of incentivizing buyers and sellers to pay creator fees, and to ensure that future collections enforce creator fees on-chain.” This is extremely lazy and unacceptable on the part of OS. The least they could do is continue to enforce royalties for projects that don’t have upgradeable contracts. Instead, they are just kind of shrugging their shoulders and suggesting that each individual project just figure it out on their own.

y00ts Finally Reveal 🍾

What seemed like a matter of “wen?” “wen?” finally happened late last week barely 24 hours after DeLabs through its pseudonymous founder Frank announced last week Thursday while speaking live at the Solana Conference in Lisbon that the yOOts art reveal is imminent in the next 48 hours. Well, it didn't take up to 48 hours before degens could start burning their tOObs in exchange for the actual PFP NFT- yOOts.

Despite the price of Solana plummeting at the moment, the collection sits comfortably on the floor price of 70 ◎ with over 250K total volume generated on Magic Eden. With a 78K volume generated just a few hours after the reveal, yOOtsNFT has been held responsible for instigating the massive trading volume for NFTs minted on Solana in its first 24 hours. Tiexo reported a soar of 170% in trading the volume which made up to 275K SOL across the market. A thing to take home from this reveal is DeLabs changing course for yOOts in terms of royalties (now 3.33%) after slashing the creator royalty on DeGods and tOObs to zero. The same was expected for yOOts but the team suggested that there was no point in setting royalties if they couldn’t be enforced on-chain and there will be no enforcement if one don not pays the royalties.

Where is the ART? 🎨

With PFPs flooding every social media feed when searching for NFTs, a lot of active “NFTers” don’t pay attention to the “ART”. This is not to say that PFPs aren’t art, which is apparent in collections such as Kooks by Terry Urban, but actual generative art that has been created on the blockchain is what tends to get overlooked.

There are factions of folks that only collect art, specifically in the Art Blocks ecosystem. “Art Blocks is a first-of-its-kind platform focused on genuinely programmable on-demand generative content that is stored immutably on the Ethereum Blockchain.” According to their website, Art Blocks focuses on “creative coding with blockchain technology to establish a new paradigm for the creation and ownership of art.” With over 370 collections created on their platform since 2020, Art Blocks is the most popular platform for artists to create generative art, which can come in the form of a “static image, 3D model(s), or an interactive experience… Each output is different and there are endless possibilities for the types of content that can be created on the platform.”

Just last week, the platform’s founder, Erick Calderon (Snowfro) released a collection in collaboration with Alexis André (MacTuitui) called Friendship Bracelets. Anyone that was holding an Art Blocks piece in their wallet at the time of the snapshot (October 26, 2022) is eligible to mint 2 bracelets for free. This collection is also inflationary because pieces get minted every day, until January 10, 2023, when the claim window ends. No one knows how many bracelets will end up being minted, but the total count at the moment is 20,521 NFTs.

These bracelets are now sitting at a floor of 0.22 ETH, at the time of writing, with any palette attribute NFT sitting comfortably around 0.4 ETH. With only 8% listed and people trying to curate complete sets of palettes and common pieces, the floor has been rising organically since mint. And the majority of these pieces are going into the hands of true Art Blocks collectors, not traders. Another thing to keep in mind is that this collection is the first in their Explorations series. Time will tell what this experiment entails, and what Snowfro has further up his sleeve. WAGMI.

Sponsored Content: There is no sponsored content in this newsletter.

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• Apple Hates Web3

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Disclaimer: The Drop DOES NOT provide financial advice. All content is for informational purposes only. The Drop is not a registered investment, legal, or tax advisor or a broker/dealer. Trading any crypto-related asset is extremely risky and could result in significant capital losses.

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